Exploring the Boo scripting language

GHOSTSTORY

Author(s): TIM SCHÜRMANN

Boo is a scripting language tailor-made for Mono and .NET. This haunting mixture of Python and C# may be just what you need to get started with the .NET framework.

Rodrigo Barreto de Oliveira was frustrated; he couldn’t find a programming language that was suitable for his next project. Python didn’t have the kind of static type checking he needed, and he would have preferred better .NET integration. C# was well integrated with .NET, but it required too much typing. These disappointments led Rodrigo to develop his own scripting language. His new language would be Python-based, and it would rely on the Common Language Infrastructure (or CLI) and the Dotnet framework. He spiced the results with a couple of C# and Ruby design principles and finally came up with the object-oriented Boo [1] language, which is available for Linux thanks to the Mono environment. Saying Hello Because the ubiquitous “Hello World” with its print("Hello World") line is almost too trivial, Listing 1 gives you a GTK# variant on the theme.